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Friday, October 12, 2012

Pilot Season: Arrow (It's Super Cliched, But Cute)

Okay, if you watched Smallville
and liked it in the slightest, I’m just going to skip over the rest of the
review and say that you’ll probably like Arrow,
so you might as well just start watching now.

For the rest of you who (like me) found Smallville insufferable, except for Michael Rosenbaum who was
easily the best part, Arrow is a
slightly harder sell. It focuses on Oliver Queen, who actually did appear on Smallville, the billionaire turned vigilante,
because there aren’t enough of those already. Queen is sort of a Robin Hood
character, devoted to social justice and very fond of his green costume and
archery skills.

Played by Stephen Amell, Oliver Queen is a brooding, deep,
troubled young man, who’s just come back home after being stranded on a hostile
island for five years. There was a shipwreck, a bunch of people died, he’s been
fighting monsters in the jungle, etc. You know the drill. It’s superhero
backstory number seven, just after alien being and before trained assassin gone
good.

The circumstances of the shipwreck are still a little murky.
Basically, there was a storm, lightning or something hit the ship, it sank,
people died. Then Oliver and his father ended up on a lifeboat with a crewman.
His father got all fatalistic and determined that Oliver would be the only one
to get out of there, so he shot the other guy and himself. Then Oliver washed
up on an island of horrors, and his PTSD has been boiling ever since.

Also some chick died in the wreck, who happened to be the
sister of Ollie’s love interest, which means there is ANGST in our futures.

Said love interest, Laurel (played by Katie Cassidy, who was
spectacular on Supernatural but keeps
getting jerked around by CW casting), is a plucky young reporter fighting to
right the wrongs of the big city. She’s unfazed by money or fame, and her
father’s even a cop! Actually he’s the Chief of Police, I think, played by Paul
Blackthorne. They really swung for the fences on casting here. Her dad hates
Ollie. Which makes sense because Oliver did kill one daughter and break the
other’s heart.

Okay, he didn’t technically kill her. But he sure didn’t
help.

Anyway, Oliver comes back to the city with a list that we
can assume his father gave him. The list details a bunch of wealthy
industrialists who’re mean and stuff. You know, the guys we protested in Occupy
Wall Street. It’s a bit disingenuous, given that Queen, like Bruce Wayne, Lex
Luthor and Tony Stark before him, is filthy stinking rich, and as with all
those cases (except Luthor) their point would be better made with social reform
and funding infrastructure. But who cares! Superheroes!

Susanna Thompson also pops up, playing Ollie’s mom, and she
is, of course, a bit villainous in some unspecified way. We are supposed to
assume, I guess, that she’s somehow profiting off of his death, and now that
he’s alive, she’s less than thrilled. Comic fans will love the addition of
Oliver’s sister, too, who is nicknamed “Speedy” and has a – that’s right – drug
problem. Oh the seventies.

Mostly, though, it’s an average show. It has, like most
superhero stuff, the potential to be truly great. If Amell ever learns that
there’s more to acting than brooding at a window, and if Cassidy finally gets a
role that’s more than plucky support-girl, we’ll really have something here.

From a logistics standpoint, I do think this is a show that
will probably do just fine. It’s got an immediate audience of all the Smallville watchers, is paired with Supernatural, so it might get a bump off
their rabid fanbase, and it’s probably pretty cheap to make. So, good job CW.